Water, water everywhere.

Bad water. Sad water.

Tidal waves in his homeland of Sri Lanka.

And now sad water pours inside his Bismarck apartment.

Sometimes, as he sits at the computer and reads the latest news, the "water pours," said Arumarajah Muthiah, 48, of Bismarck.

That's how he describes his tears.

Muthiah said he can't imagine how people there will manage - what they will find to eat.

That will not be a worry for 12 members of his brother's wife's family. They are gone. And so is their seaside home and the rest of the southern coastal town of Hambantota and its roughly 2,000 residents. His brother and sister-in-law grieve from afar. They live in the United Kingdom, he said.

They, like many other members of Muthiah's family, left their homeland years before Sunday's natural disaster for safety reasons.

Decades of war, rebels and assassinations made it unsafe to stay.

Muthiah, who has lived in Bismarck since 2000, now hopes that if any good can come out of this horrible event, it will be that his country will finally unite.

He said there are dead on both sides now, rebels and government supporters, and accounts are being heard of enemies joining forces in the relief effort.

"My prayer … make peace, not war. We are brothers," said Muthiah, who was once a primary school teacher in northern Sri Lanka and is now a certified nursing assistant for a Mandan nursing home.

He is thankful for the freedom in the United States for him, his wife and daughter, but there is loneliness, the loss of family and friends and homeland. He dreams someday of returning.

His daughter, Joyanah Arumarajah, 12, was only 4 when they left for Egypt and then later for America, and she doesn't remember all of those things her parents miss.

Political problems in Sri Lanka began after the country, a British colony, achieved independence in 1948 and a power struggle began soon after between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority.

After independence, the Singalese began to question the fairness of top governmental positions being held by the Tamil minority, and rightly so, said Lionel Muthiah, of Mandan, who is of Tamil descent and Arumarajah Muthiah's cousin.

But questions of inequity escalated from verbal struggles into decades of bloody revolts, ethnic cleansing and assassinations of top government leaders.

Recently, the country has had three years of relative calm because of peace negotiations helped along by a Norwegian delegation. But those negotiations were coming apart in 2003 and there were fears of renewed political storms.

Now there are other things to worry about.

Singalese and Tamil alike, thousands are gone. The death toll there was about 22,000 Wednesday. The total death toll in the region was estimated Wednesday at about 77,000, including victims in Indonesia, India, Thailand, Malaysia and other countries in the region.

Lionel Muthiah said he spoke recently with a missionary friend who informed him that a Methodist church in Sumatra has completely vanished and so has the female pastor. They are looking for her, but she is nowhere to be found.

And for a while, anyway, so are political struggles.

(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at 250-8254 or at vgrantier@ndonline.com.)